NRA wins battle, but not the war

Twenty dead schoolchildren weren't enough Wednesday for a U.S. Senate cowed by the National Rifle Association.

The Senate rejected a bipartisan effort to expand federal background checks to more firearms buyers, covering all transactions at gun shows and online. In so doing, it revealed itself as worse than a "do-nothing" body: it has become a sanctuary for too many cowards.

Who, in the name of all that is sane and holy, do the NRA and its quivering fellow travelers in the Capitol believe they are representing? Certainly not the victims of the Newtown shooting. Nor their families. Nor those who loved the more than 32,000 people killed in the United States by guns in 2011.

Nor most rational Americans.

The bipartisan amendment failed when only 54 senators voted to advance the bill, falling six short of what was needed. Forty-one Republicans and five Democrats sided with the NRA. Round one has gone to those overzealous interpreters of the Second Amendment, but as President Barack Obama said after the vote, the battle is not done.

Congress is so afraid of the supposed power of the NRA to call down its lobbying wrath on any who dare to question its irrational positions that 60 members of the Senate could not summon up the courage to approve even the most modest measures to resist the growing threat of gun violence. They could not muster enough spine to extend background checks to nearly all gun purchases, or to toughen penalties against illegal gun trafficking, even though the vast majority of Americans support such measures.

What does it say about this nation that even the tamest of measures is blocked? What does it say that stronger gun control measures, such as Obama's original call to ban assault rifles and the high-capacity magazines that leave shooters able to fire large bursts of ammunition without having to reload won't even get a hearing? As Obama put it, it proves that the gun lobby is "more passionate, more organized and more vocal" than the will of the majority of our citizens.

That must change. Starting now.

The NRA said the bill was an ineffective infringement on gun rights - an argument as vacuous as it is wrong. No single piece of legislation will eradicate violence or evil in the world, but closing a loophole will at least keep some guns out of the hands of criminals and madmen. The NRA cannot win the argument on rational grounds, so it trumps up fallacious arguments to keep its members in line, using the tactics of the common bully. The war, though, has barely begun, not with bullets and blood, but with honest debate and true passion.

On Wednesday, 20 dead schoolchildren were not enough. Today, and it is to be hoped, tomorrow, that will be enough for the vast majority of Americans to make their voices heard above the deafening roar of the NRA and get the job done.

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NRA wins battle, but not the war

Twenty dead schoolchildren weren't enough Wednesday for a U.S. Senate cowed by the National Rifle Association.

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